Stumped by Te’o story? It shows your age

By Matthew Heimer

Few stories are gobbling up more airtime right now than the saga of Manti Te’o and his nonexistent girlfriend. For most of the just-concluded football season, the reputation of the Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy finalist was further burnished by the story of his long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, a Stanford student whose tragic death from leukemia in September helped inspire and motivate Te’o during an improbably successful season.

Sports Illustrated

The helmet may come in handy when Manti Te’o explains himself to the media.

Te’o shared his Internet-era take on Love Story with the local and national media on multiple occasions. The problem: As reported this week by the sports website Deadspin, Kekua never existed. Te’o is now saying he was a victim of a hoax, perpetrated by someone he connected with online in 2011 and has never met in person. Who exactly perpetrated the hoax, and why, and whether Te’o himself kept the Kekua story alive after he found out it was false, remains to be untangled.

The Internet loves stuff like this, of course, and the Web is buzzing with examples of “Teoing” – posting a photograph of yourself with your arms wrapped around an imaginary girlfriend – and no shortage of jokes at the ballplayer’s expense. But among a slightly older crowd, there’s a different sentiment brewing, one that could be summarized as: Who dates someone they’ve never met? What was the point of having fought the sexual revolution, boomers are asking, if the next generation is just going to skip the whole physical contact thing?

That reaction has led to some entertaining cultural collisions online. Joe Weisenthal, the deputy editor at Business Insider, wrote on Twitter earlier today that much of the confusion and outrage over the Te’o hoax reflects a generational disconnect. Weisenthal, who’s in his early 30s, later added more pungently:

People who think you need to “meet” someone before you can call them your girlfriend or boyfriend are still tweeting from their typewriter.

The ultimate takeaway may be pretty simple: Social media encourages an intimacy that feels foreign to those of us who didn’t grow up with it. A Pew Research Center study last year found that the average Facebook user has never met 7% of his or her Facebook “friends“; for kids aged 12-15, that figure is closer to 25%. For better and often for worse, frequent social-media users also tend to be more trusting of the folks they meet online, according to the Pew report. So be prepared for a wave of commentary explaining that while the Te’o story may be bizarre, having a boy/girlfriend you’ve never met is just a relatively common sign of the times.

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Encore looks at the changing nature of retirement, from new rules and guidelines for financial security to the shifting identities, needs and priorities of people saving for and living in retirement. Our lead blogger is editor Matthew Heimer, and frequent contributors include editor Amy Hoak, writer Catey Hill, and MarketWatch columnists Elizabeth O’Brien, Robert Powell and Andrea Coombes. Encore also features regular commentary from The Wall Street Journal retirement columnists Glenn Ruffenach and Anne Tergesen and the Director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, Alicia H. Munnell.